The more things change...

[elisi]

From Thrones, Dominations by Dorothy Sayers. These snippets from the morning after the death of King George V (he died 20 January 1936):

From Chapter 4:

London had an odd feeling about it that morning. There was a stir of mournful excitement: people walked purposefully, yet abstractedly, as though something of secret importance waited them at the end of their journey. Harriet Wimsey, strolling slowly along Oxford Street, turned her novelist's mind to wondering what it was that made the crowd seem so unlike its ordinary daily self. Nearly everybody still wearing colours, yet the atmosphere was that of a funeral - of a village funeral. That was it. London had turned into a great village overnight, where every inhabitant knew the other's business and could read the other's mind. All these shoppers in Oxford Street, for instance; they were buying black, thinking about buying black, wondering how much black they could afford, or with how little black they could satisfy the instinct for decent self-expression. Behind the glittering barriers of plate-glass were shop assistants, window-dressers, buyers, managers, displaying black, checking the stock of black, issuing orders to the manufacturers for fresh supplies of black, anxiously calculating how far the demand for black would compensate for inevitable loss on coloured spring goods already ordered.

And a little later, this is Mr Delagardie speaking:

King George was a safe man and the country had grown used to him. The English do not care for change, and any new idea is repugnant to them.

~

I'm not in London, so I can't speak to it having become a village, but I'm sure it's not inaccurate.